Let Justice Descend. Lisa Black
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project. He’s getting some kid financed to buy up riverfront land and build an ‘innovation center,’ a building where start-ups can rent a little space along with copiers, printers, and phones and start their own business, because we all know someone who turned their science fair project into the next Starbucks or Apple, right? That’s all cute and fine, except he’s asking the city to approve a twelve-million-dollar grant to pay for this—that’s not a twelve-million-dollar tax loan or tax credit or even subsidy, it’s just a twelve-million-dollar blank check. I don’t know how much of that is kicking back to Green, but I’ve heard estimates as high as sixty percent.”
“What has that got to do with Diane?” Riley asked when she paused to take a breath.
“Diane is the whole reason anyone is paying attention to it! Green had been keeping this as far under the radar as he could. Somehow he got the levy passed last year, but since then he’s quashed anyone who even mentions it, except when he wants to announce how he’s bringing jobs to Cleveland.” Her fingers made air quotes around the last four words, derision dripping from her voice. “Then he talks up a storm about how innovation and entrepreneurship are the keys to the future—well, yeah, because no one can make a freakin’ livable wage in this economy. But the media, news channels, a newspaper reporter who’s been trying to follow the money trail—they were all stonewalled. Diane was trying to help find the truth.”
Riley said, “Okay. Anything else?”
“Else? What else do you need?”
“We’ll check out his whereabouts. But—”
“That won’t help. He’s got a cadre of loyalists, his own doctor to keep his happy pills off the books, mechanics to sweep for bugs or plant a few, and I’m sure there’s a few professional assassins in the lot. Look, he—I mean, you live here, you must know about this guy. He’s chief of Economic Development, which is in the Regional Development division. So he’s right in there with Community Development, Building and Housing, City Planning, even the port. As they can tell you in New Jersey, that’s where the money is. Utility contracts, building contracts, construction, rezoning—anything you want to accomplish in the city of Cleveland, you have to grease Green’s palm. You want specifics?” She gestured with both hands, pointing her right index finger to the left and the left to the right, illustrating the interconnectedness of this circle of favors and funds. “A halfway house system gave him a refrigerator and a trip to Las Vegas to get a partnership arrangement with the Department of Corrections. A paving company that did some work in the park system, the, um, Emerald Necklace place—”
“The Metroparks,” Maggie supplied.
“Yeah, that. They also paved Green’s driveway and his sister’s. The union negotiator for a housing development along the lake gave him limousine service for three years. One guy got a lease for an ice-skating rink at the same time Green got a speedboat that had belonged to the guy’s restaurant business. A bank executive had sex with him a few times to get her daughter a teaching position at a downtown charter school. What else would you like to know? I can go on and on.”
“One thing,” Jack said. “Do you have any proof of any of this?”
“That’s not the question you should be asking. You should—”
“Don’t tell me what questions I should be asking!” Jack shot back, his voice suddenly thunderous in that way that sucked all the air out of the room and made time slow to a crawl. Even knowing him, knowing as much as she did about him, and even though it wasn’t directed at her, it made Maggie’s heart flutter to a skitterish beat.
But then, fear pervaded because she did know quite a bit about him.
Kelly, of course, didn’t have that knowledge. She didn’t know that Jack had deceived everyone around him far more thoroughly than any politician could. “Don’t try the good cop, bad cop bit on me. It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than that act to throw me off.”
This almost made Maggie smile, because the two men were not putting on a show. Riley really was a pleasant, fairly compassionate officer. And Jack was—well, Jack.
“We don’t act,” Riley said, calmly but more coolly than usual. “Your boss has been murdered, and we are going to find out who did it. We need facts, not all the rhetoric. Now, do you have evidence to prove any of this?”
Her shoulders slumped about an inch. “If I had proof, we wouldn’t have needed to spend a penny on the campaign.”
Riley asked, “Speaking of the election, would killing Diane really make it a slam dunk for Green? Wouldn’t another candidate—”
“We’ll never get the ads, the name recognition, queued up fast enough. Even if we got someone already known—like the governor . . . that might be cool if he hadn’t already said he wasn’t interested. Two days? Impossible. All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of party loyalists and hope that is enough. And it may not be,” she added morosely. “There’s an awful lot of Independents these days.”
“Didn’t anyone else run in the primary?” Riley asked.
“Three, but they’re out of money, and the party wasn’t interested in any of them, anyway.”
“What about the voters? Were they interested?”
Another one of those long, perplexed looks, as if Kelly wondered what color the sky was on Riley’s planet, while the color of his skin began to flush with annoyance. Patiently, she explained, “Voters decide on the winner, but they don’t decide on who runs in the first place. Parties do. They pick the people they think could win, pay for their ads, and finance everything they need, depending on how much they need it—which depends on the district. If your district is ninety percent red or blue, obviously you don’t need to spend a lot of money.” She glanced at all three people in the kitchen to assess their tracking abilities, without appearing reassured, and went further. “Someone doesn’t wind up in office because they woke up in their bungalow in Podunk, Iowa, and decided to run for office. They get into office because their party needed a candidate and went looking for one, buttered them up, wooed them away from their jobs and homes, agreed to take care of their campaign, and sent them into the ring.”
“The other candidates are only there to make it look like a real contest,” Jack translated.
“Sort of.” Her shoulders slumped from the weight on them. “That’s why I have to get back to the HQ, so we can start figuring out who to pick.”
“What about you?” Jack asked.
Her jaw dropped a millimeter or two. “Me? I’m not a politician. I work for politicians.”
It didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea to Maggie but was clearly laughable to Kelly. It also seemed to remove any All About Eve type motivations from Diane Cragin’s chief of staff.
Riley asked, “Let’s suppose it isn’t Green. Who else did Diane conflict with? Had she been getting any hate mail? People getting in her face at public appearances?”
“Um, everyone, yes, and all the time. That’s politics these days. Conflict drives interest, and without interest people don’t donate. But other than the usual rhetoric, I can’t think of anyone really . . . scary. Except maybe—”
A knock sounded at the door, and Riley went to speak to the scene contamination officer, who wanted to know if the chief of homicide and a few other bigwig looky-loos could be allowed into the yard. The detective went out to give them a guided tour, and Kelly moved over to the stacks of haphazard paper on the dining room table. “As I recall, these are physical letters, these are printouts of the e-mails, and these are ones we flagged for some sort of action, like referring them to someone in their precinct. Do we have any coffee? I’m running a quart low, and I’m going to need it. Can I please call DC now?”
“In a minute,” Jack said.
“And some of them,” she continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself, “get kind of weird.” But instead